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Decoloniality at large with Cetshwayo Mabhena
The answer is yes but let’s talk about a recent event. There has been a mixture of laughter and some sorrow surrounding the just completed African peace mission in Russia and Ukraine. This has been a mission loaded with many meanings including the place of Africa in world affairs and the world system. President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa led five other presidents of African countries (some represented by their foreign ministers) to Russia and Ukraine on a peace mission, to press the belligerents to “end the conflict by peaceful means,” and do so with urgency. On the sorrowful side of things is the wide expression of pain and tragedy at the reality of leaders of African countries, some poor and powerless countries, leaving their troubled countries to mediate in a faraway European war. On the laughter side of things, there is the hilarious image of a continent punching above its diplomatic and political weight trying to mediate in a European war where superpowers, mighty powers, are involved and are militarily invested. Some cynics have even noted that Ramaphosa might have used this opportunity to divert attention away from the trouble South Africa is in with the United States of America over the allegations of exporting some weapons and munitions to Russia at some point. Besides the sorrow and the laughter about the African peace mission to Eastern Europe, I elect to take the political and diplomatic gesture as of grave importance and sound relevance for the African continent, Europe, humanity under the sun. Here is Africa taking a strong position in the world, no matter the sorrow and the joke abound. My take follows.
I recall African philosophers, Steve Biko and Frantz Fanon before him, observing that it is going to be Africans that are going to save humanity by teaching Europeans and Americans humanness and ubuntu. Fanon, for instance, was not only philosophical but was also poetic about it. He appealed to Africans to abandon the European example and chart a new path for humanity. It is vintage Fanon who said to Africans: “Come, then, comrades; it would be as well to decide at once to change our ways. We must shake off the heavy darkness into which we were plunged and leave it behind. The new day, which is already at hand must find us firm, prudent, and resolute. We must leave our dreams and abandon our old beliefs and friendships of the time before life began. Let us waste no time in sterile litanies and nauseating mimicry. Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe. For centuries they have stifled almost the whole of humanity in the name of a so-called spiritual experience. Look at them today swaying between atomic and spiritual disintegration.”
There was even a boast in Fanon. He boasted that the European political and social game had ended, and it was time for Africa to show the world and humanity alternative paths to human futures. He offered that: “Come, then, comrades, the European game has finally ended; we must find something different. We today can do everything, so long as we do not imitate Europe, so long as we are not obsessed by the desire to catch up with Europe. Europe now lives at such a mad, reckless pace that she has shaken off all guidance and all reason, and she is running headlong into the abyss; we would do well to avoid it with all possible speed.” It was Fanon’s radical decolonial philosophical observation that as much as the Euro-American establishment looked powerful and prosperous, mighty even, but it had fundamental weaknesses and tragic flaws. Empire was, to Fanon, most fragile at its mightiest. The victory and the power of the Euro-American centre and its conquest and its power had become its undoing and end. Fanon is truer now, perhaps, than he ever was. I take the African peace mission to Russia and Ukraine in serious Fanonian terms. The African peace message to Euro-America is important even if it might be more symbolic than material. Some of the greatest significances of politics are ceremonial and symbolic, ritualistic even. The African peace mission is one such, I observe.
When Africa taught the world
I earnestly see the African peace mission as having been inspired by Fanonian philosophical reason of saving Euro-America and humanity from disaster and catastrophe. Taking Africa seriously and marching forward to save humanity from Euro-American insanity may after all be the “Blackman’s burden” of our day. No one can put it better than Fanon: “Come, brothers, we have far too much work to do for us to play the game of rear-guard. Europe has done what she set out to do and on the whole, she has done it well; let us stop blaming her but let us say to her firmly that she should not make such a song and dance about it. We have no more to fear; so, let us stop envying her,” said Fanon, adding that “the Third World today faces Europe like a colossal mass whose aim should be to try to resolve the problems to which Europe has not been able to find the answers.” Given that one of the reasons that one of the justifications of colonisation of Africa by Europe was that the Europeans intended to save Africans from their tribal and territorial wars, it is poetic that African leaders travelled to Europe to ask Europeans to stop fighting. The colonial stereotype has always been of Europeans saving Africans from war, hunger, disease, and other calamities. The present peace mission in Europe is not the first by Africa.
Historians would remind us of the terse letter that Kwame Nkrumah wrote to American President, Lydon B Johnson, advising that America should stop bombing North Vietnam. Even as Nkrumah’s advice was haughtily ignored it was heard and it represented African political and human wisdom. Africa was at long last getting involved at a leadership level in world human and political affairs, which is not a light matter. When China fought India in 1962, Britain gave India military assistance, much the same way that the USA and their allies are supporting Ukraine. Nkrumah wrote another terse letter, this time to Harold McMillan of the United Kingdom. Part of the letter read: “Are you sure that by giving support, whatever that is, to one side against the other, you will be able to increase the chances of bringing an end to hostilities?” It is a confident and proud African president in the shape of Nkrumah who told a European leader that: “Assistance by way of arms and equipment to any country engaged in a conflict with another, in my view, is likely merely to occasion a counteroffer of assistance to the other parties to the dispute.” From Africa, Nkrumah was donating wisdom to Europe about peace, against war. Africa’s voice might not be that loud and that heavy in the United Nations now. But it has always been important that the world knows that Africa thinks, Africa knows, and Africa has some important truth for the world and for humanity.
Towards a Multi-polar World
It might have been Africa the usual victim that pleads for salvation from Europe when the peace delegation emphasised how the war in Ukraine was increasing food prices, grain prices, and fuel prices in Africa. But the weighty point is that Africa was taking its place as a leader in the world amongst other leaders. Africa was performing its role in the march towards a multi-polar world that has many centres of power. Decolonially thinking, speaking, and acting, it must at last be normal that Africa has wisdom and resolve from which the world and humanity can benefit. Africa the peacemaker and Africa against war is an important sign of the times in an ever-maddening world that is threatened by pandemics and nuclear wars.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Walter Sisulu University, East London, in South Africa. Contacts: [email protected].
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